Companies spent $18.6 billion on analytics in 2013, according to the report, up 58 percent over the previous 12 months and about two and a half times more than in 2011. Kelly estimates that the industry will pass the $28 billion mark by the end of this year and achieve revenues of over $50 billion in 2017, a massive increase he credits to rapidly growing demand for emerging solutions such as NoSQL databases as well as more established technologies that are proving valuable in extracting insights.